An airline cockpit access system vulnerable to a single quote in a login box. White-hat hackers quietly holding an entire flight database. And tech interviews that feel more like interrogations than conversations. In this SEEK Bytes episode, the crew dig deeper into real-world security failures and then we pivot into raw, honest engineering interview horror stories and practical tips for staying human and effective under pressure.

In this episode, we explore:

• How a real airline security system got hacked via SQL injection – and why exposing raw SQL errors, skipping extra checks and trusting third parties blindly can be so dangerous.

• The basics of SQL injection and how to defend against it – in plain language, with examples of string concatenation gone wrong, parameterised queries done right, and the top attack types every engineer should know.

• What good (and bad) tech interviews look like in practice – red flags to run from, how to manage “exam panic”, and why being human, curious and clear about your gaps can still set you apart.

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How do you run dozens of React apps, keep dependencies sane, preview any branch on any environment – and still move fast without breaking prod? In Part 2 of our frontend deep dive, Elliott Millar, Will and Jared Hope (Engineering Manager, Frontend Practices at SEEK) go beyond components to explore platforms, tooling and practices that power SEEK’s web experience at scale.

This episode's special guest: Jared Hope (SEEK Engineering Manager, Frontend Practices)

In this episode (Part 2), we explore:

• How SEEK turns frontend into an “experience platform” – from modeling the web platform, static site generation and UI versioning, to giving teams self-serve routing and deployments on top of Cloudflare and serverless.

• The tools that supercharge DX and design collaboration – including SEEK’s internal deploy tooling, environment-per-branch previews, and Playroom, which lets engineers and designers prototype in real components and share ideas with a single URL.

• How SEEK keeps frontend modern at scale – using Upkeep and Renovate to tame dependency sprawl, exploring SSR and React server components without losing SSG DX, and leaning on devtools, hot reload and consoles for fast, pragmatic debugging.

If you’re a frontend or full-stack engineer, SRE, architect, platform/DevOps engineer or IT leader who enjoyed Part 1 – or you’re just curious how high-traffic sites keep their web layer fast, safe and flexible – this Part 2 is packed with real-world patterns, trade-offs and career insights you can take back to your own org.

If you’re a frontend or full-stack engineer, SRE, architect, platform/DevOps engineer or IT leader who enjoyed Part 1 – or you’re just curious how high-traffic sites keep their web layer fast, safe and flexible – this Part 2 is packed with real-world patterns, trade-offs and career insights you can take back to your own org.

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Frontend is “just HTML and CSS”, right? Not at SEEK. In this episode of SEEK Bytes – a podcast by engineers for engineers – we sit down with Jarrod Hope, Engineering Manager for Frontend Practices, to explore how SEEK builds UIs at scale with React, Braid, SKU, Vanilla Extract and Playroom, and why good frontends are genuinely hard, high-impact engineering problems.

This episode's special guest: Jared Hope (SEEK Engineering Manager, Frontend Practices)

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How SEEK’s frontend platform works under the hood – from micro frontends and the SKU meta-framework to Metropolis, which lets teams share React components and roll out design-system updates across 80+ apps without chaos.

• Why SEEK invests in open source tools like Braid, Playroom and Vanilla Extract – how “building in the open” raises quality, shapes the broader frontend community, and gives engineers type-safe CSS, shared UI language with designers, and zero-config prototyping.

• Why SEEK doubled-down on React (and what’s next) – the original shift from Razor to server-rendered React, what it would take to move frameworks, and how tools like Vite, Suspense and better CSS module systems are shaping the future of the “experience platform”.

Whether you’re a frontend engineer, full-stack dev, engineering manager, architect or curious IT generalist, this episode is a behind-the-scenes tour of how a large tech org thinks about UI, frameworks, tooling and open source – and how those decisions ripple through the wider web community.

Whether you’re a frontend engineer, full-stack dev, engineering manager, architect or curious IT generalist, this episode is a behind-the-scenes tour of how a large tech org thinks about UI, frameworks, tooling and open source – and how those decisions ripple through the wider web community.

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Org restructures. New tools. Platform migrations. That “we’re changing how everything works” email. If you work in IT, change is your default setting – but it doesn’t always feel that way. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Elliott Millar, Will and special guest Sarah Duffy (Enterprise Change Lead at SEEK) unpack how to thrive in continuous change, not just survive it.

This episode's special guest: Sarah Duffy (SEEK Enterprise Change Lead)

In this episode, we explore:

• What your brain is doing during change (and how to make it “brain-friendly”) – including the SCARF model (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness), why change can trigger fight-or-flight, and how clear comms, certainty about the plan and fair processes dramatically reduce stress.

• How SEEK runs large-scale change without “doing it by email” – from the Unification rollout across six countries to leader shark-tank sessions, change-champion networks and co-creation via focus groups, end-user testing and continuous listening to resistance as a source of insight.

• Practical tools to personally thrive in change – including the IKEA effect and co-creation, the ACCESS framework (acknowledge, calm, challenge, exercise, social, sleep), sleep-hygiene tips, and simple techniques like box breathing and SCARF self-assessments you can use at your desk during stressful transitions.

If you’re in software engineering, data, product, support, people leadership or any IT role facing restructures, tool changes or big programs, this episode gives you science-backed frameworks and everyday habits to handle change with more confidence – and help your teams do the same.

If you’re in software engineering, data, product, support, people leadership or any IT role facing restructures, tool changes or big programs, this episode gives you science-backed frameworks and everyday habits to handle change with more confidence – and help your teams do the same.

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Got half-finished apps, tools and games sitting in your GitHub? You’re not alone. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Seamus, Elliott and Will kick off Season 2 by diving deep into side projects in tech – why we start them, why they stall, and how to actually ship things alongside a full-time IT job.

In this episode, we explore:

• Where great side-project ideas really come from – using annoying real-world problems, interview prep and portfolio goals to spark projects that matter (and look great on GitHub).

• How to fight decision-fatigue and stay motivated – why “projects about nothing” fizzle, how tiny, shippable increments beat grand architectures, and practical tactics like shrinking scope, embracing “good enough” and expecting motivation slumps from day one.

• Balancing passion, learning and paid side work – real stories of late-night coding, paid gigs on game sites, internal tools like Conductor that became critical at SEEK, and why sometimes your day job’s learning and L&D time are all the “side project” you need.

Whether you’re a software engineer, tester, data person, SRE, sysadmin or IT manager thinking about a side hustle, a portfolio piece, or just a fun game on the side, this episode will help you pick better projects, manage your energy and actually finish more than you start.

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Your tests are green, coverage is high, dependencies are “secure”… so why does production still feel like a house of cards? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Raph, Will and Elliott dig into trust in tech – from subtle JavaScript bugs and leaky abstractions to CDN attacks and noisy security reports – and why a healthy dose of skepticism is one of the most powerful tools an IT pro can have.

In this episode, we explore:

• How trust can be broken at every layer – from third-party CDNs like polyfill.js injecting malicious scripts, to chatbots pulling in compromised resources, to noisy vulnerability reports that burn out open source maintainers.

• Why abstractions are powerful… and treacherous – what “leaky abstractions” really mean in practice, how unknown-unknowns derail estimates, and why learning just one layer deeper (query plans, caches, orchestration platforms) can save you from nasty surprises in production.

• How to adopt a healthy “trust, but verify” mindset – treating tests and coverage as signals not guarantees, double-checking rollouts, reading docs and source instead of relying on hearsay, and staying just skeptical enough to catch the next Heartbleed-class bug before it bites you.

Whether you’re in software engineering, QA, security, SRE, data, platform, or IT leadership, this episode will sharpen your instincts about what (and who) to trust in your stack – and how to balance healthy paranoia with getting real work shipped.

Whether you’re in software engineering, QA, security, SRE, data, platform, or IT leadership, this episode will sharpen your instincts about what (and who) to trust in your stack – and how to balance healthy paranoia with getting real work shipped.

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Resources:

• https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dev-rejects-cve-severity-makes-his-github-repo-read-only/

• https://lab.wallarm.com/polyfill-io-supply-chain-attack-malicious-javascript-injection-puts-over-100k-websites-at-risk/

• https://carbon-steel.github.io/jekyll/update/2024/06/19/abstractions.html

REST is everywhere in tech – but “we have a REST API” doesn’t mean it’s easy to use, safe or scalable. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Will, Seamus and Elliott break down the real-world best practices that turn yet-another-endpoint into an API your consumers (and SREs) actually love – from URL design and validation to rate limiting, async jobs and monitoring.

In this episode, we explore:

• What REST really means in practice – why it’s an architectural style not just CRUD, the role of statelessness, resource-oriented design, and how REST compares to SOAP, GraphQL and gRPC in real SEEK systems.

• How to design APIs that are predictable and easy to use – covering plural resource names, clean URIs, versioning strategies, status codes that actually mean something, filtering/sorting/pagination, strong yet flexible validation, and OpenAPI-driven docs and SDKs.

• The “grown-up” side of APIs: performance, safety and observability – why good monitoring and logs are non-negotiable, how to think about SLAs and error budgets, using rate limiting to protect your business and your users, and avoiding both under- and over-logging.

Whether you’re a software engineer, SRE, architect, platform/DevOps engineer or IT manager, this episode gives you a concrete checklist (and plenty of war stories) for building REST APIs that are easier to consume, safer to operate and much kinder to your users’ networks and your own infrastructure.

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AI gets all the hype – but behind every “smart” feature is a blisteringly fast, brutally efficient platform making it work in production. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Seamus, Will and Elliott sit down with Ren Shao, a Staff Engineer in SEEK’s Artificial Intelligence Platform Services (AIPS) team, to unpack how SEEK’s AI-driven search really works under the hood – from models and rankings to GeoHash, big-O and CPU caches.

This episode's special guest: Ren Shao (SEEK Staff Engineer)

In this episode, we explore:

• How SEEK’s AI search actually works under the hood – from turning “17-year-old jobs” into normalized queries, to ranking 200K+ jobs in real time, to using historical clicks and impressions to learn what candidates really mean.

• Why this is more “systems engineering” than sci-fi AI – big-O thinking, GeoHash-powered radius search, clever use of CPU caches and HashMaps, and the “latency numbers every programmer should know” that turn textbook algorithms into production-grade platforms.

• How to break into AI platform roles without a PhD – the difference between data engineers, data scientists and “small systems” engineers at AIPS; why curiosity about internals matters more than memorising neural nets; and how open-source code, sites like Codewars and tools like Hugging Face can be your on-ramp.

If you’re in software engineering, data, SRE, platform, architecture or IT leadership and want to see what real-world AI platforms actually look like – not just the buzzwords – this episode is a masterclass in building fast, safe and scalable systems that power millions of job searches every day.

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Ever shipped a “simple” feature and discovered your date/time logic is on fire? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, the crew dive into the weird, wonderful and truly painful world of time zones, UTC and daylight savings – and why getting this wrong can break products, reports and disaster recovery plans across your whole IT stack.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why time zones are way messier than you think – odd offsets, countries changing time zones overnight, multiple names for the same UTC offset, and scenarios where two people standing on the same street literally disagree on what time it is.

• How this breaks real-world systems – from expiring promo links and DR runbooks to global products that must store bookings across APAC and beyond, plus the UI pain of showing “the right” local time vs relative time for each user.

• Survival tips for developers – why standards bodies say “just store UTC + offset”, when to lean on libraries like NodaTime instead of native date objects, and how epoch timestamps, ISO 8601 formats and good packages can save you from reinventing the world’s worst wheel.

Whether you’re in software engineering, data, SRE, ops, security or any IT role that touches logs, reports, alerts or user-facing dates, this episode will change how you think about time – and probably make you a lot more cautious the next time someone says “it’s just a datetime field”.

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Remote work is here to stay – but distributed teams are a whole different game. In this episode of SEEK Bytes, Elliott, William Lark, Laavanya Kathiresen and Jerome Chan unpack how SEEK runs truly APAC-wide tech teams across Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia – without falling into “us vs them”.

This episode's special guests: Laavanya Kathiresen (SEEK Engineering Director, Candidate) and Jerome Chan (SEEK Head of Engineering, Profile & Apply)

In this episode, we explore:

• Remote vs distributed: what’s the real difference? – why “remote” is about how individuals work, while “distributed” is an organisational discipline around ways of working, agreements and processes across locations.

• How SEEK makes distributed teams actually work – setting core hours, protecting “sacred” lunch time, keeping calendars and Slack statuses up to date, using Zoom-only meetings with cameras on, and designing async done right so people stay in flow instead of drowning in Slack.

• The upside: careers, diversity and global coverage – how distributed ways of working unlock roles across Melbourne, KL, Auckland and beyond, widen the talent pool, bring richer cultural perspectives into problem-solving, and even keep the lights on when one country’s on a public holiday.

Whether you’re a software engineer, SRE, BA, PM, people leader or IT manager trying to make hybrid/distributed work actually work, this episode is packed with real tactics from teams who ship across time zones every day – without losing culture, connection or careers.

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